Sunday, November 8, 2015

Holy Troublemaking

I originally preached this sermon at the Northeast Gathering of the Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC), May 3, 2014, at MCC Hartford, CT.

Scripture:

Luke 18:1-8, the parable of the widow and the unjust judge.

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Before I start, I want to thank all those of
you who organized this gathering, and thanks to the members and friends of MCC
Hartford, and Aaron, for your hospitality. MCC ministry can be very lonely, and
it is always good to have a chance to gather together. Thank you for making
that happen!

The theme
for today’s gathering has been “A Year of Spiritual Growth and Social Justice.”
As I meditated on this theme, I remembered a dear friend who was my first
teacher in the intersection of spiritual growth and social justice. Joe was the
friend who, in the words of some Christians, “brought me to Christ”, who
invited me to stretch my spirit in ways that would spark my conversion
experience. He got me started questioning what I’d been taught about gay and
lesbian people when he came out to me. When he told me of his diagnosis, I
became a person consciously affected by HIV. Joe was the friend who introduced
me to MCC. But most of all, Joe taught me how to work for justice in the name
of Christ; and when anyone accused him of being a troublemaker, he would smile
and say, “Jesus Christ was a troublemaker.” Which, of course, is true.

As we
consider the story of the widow and the unjust judge, let us meditate on the
calling of Holy Troublemaking. This afternoon, I offer three words as a
framework: Persistence; Pride; and Perspective.

Persistence is how the widow in this story
gets the justice that she deserves. The judge refuses to hear her, but she
refuses to give up pestering him. Finally, the judge says, I had better get her
off my case before she comes and punches me in the face. No struggle for
justice is won easily; if getting justice were easy, there would be no need for
a struggle. When one’s rights are systematically denied, securing justice
requires persistence.

The
struggle for marriage equality is a case in point. In three weeks, Sharilyn and
I will have been married under Massachusetts law for ten years. But before that
civil wedding day came, thousands of ordinary people, gay and lesbian and
bisexual and transgender and straight, religious and secular, had been working for
almost as long to make civil marriage for same-sex couples a reality. When I
began with the Religious Coalition for Freedom to Marry in 1998, I honestly
doubted that we would ever be successful. But we kept on talking, and
organizing, and six years later we had gone from a list of fifteen supportive
clergy to a roster of one thousand. To work for justice is a commitment for the
long haul, if not in fact a commitment for life. The first requirement of Holy
Troublemaking is persistence.

One of the
dangers of a ministry of Holy Troublemaking, however, is that one can easily
become discouraged. Systematic injustices are entrenched, and political
adversaries can be just as persistent as we are. As a GLBTQ community, we have
seen a real sea change in attitudes toward queer people over the past few
decades; at the same time, we still have adversaries who refuse to treat us
with respect – whether it is the would-be politician who says that gay men and
lesbians deserve to die, or the well-mannered church official who agrees that I
am a child of God, but can’t allow me to serve as a minister of God. In the
face of setbacks and hostility, those of us who would be Holy Troublemakers
also need pride: not pompousness,
but a healthy sense of our own goodness as human beings worthy of respect, and
life, and love.

A little
over a half-century ago, feminist theologians began talking about gendered
definitions of sin, particularly about sins like “pride”. As a sin, pride means
to think too highly of oneself; to
place oneself in a position of domination over others. But in a society in
which men are privileged – or, at least, men with a certain amount of wealth
and a certain skin color – perhaps the spiritual failing of women is to
acquiesce to the pecking order in this “Mad Men” world; to not think highly enough of ourselves. Our friend Patrick Cheng
picks up on this theme in his book From
Sin to Amazing Grace: for queer people who have grown up and come out in an
atmosphere of shame and condemnation, our spiritual health depends on taking pride in who we are. We will need Pride celebrations to sustain us, for
at least as long as we are made “less than”. Pride allows us to stand our
ground: to not meekly back away from asserting our rights, but like the widow
in Jesus’ story, to stand our ground, secure in the knowledge that we are
deserving of justice.

Holy
troublemaking requires persistence and it requires pride, and it also needs perspective:
perspective about time and success, as well as perspective about the
interrelation of all issues of social justice.

We need to
keep our actions in perspective, in the sense that we cannot rush or compel the
process of gaining justice, any more than I can compel my tulips to all bloom
at the same time. Some of them just need a longer period of time to grow and
flower! In the middle of making justice, we can stop for a rest, to refresh
ourselves, to trust that God is in charge. If we are speaking, for example, of
the rights of queer people, we are talking about shifting the attitudes in
entire cultures, which does not happen easily or quickly. Fifty years ago, in
the wake of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the Rev. Dr. Howard
Thurman reminded his readers that changing laws is only a preliminary step
towards justice; the hard work of changing attitudes would still remain. In
fact, that hard work is far from finished today. And in the same way, our
struggles for respect as a queer people are far from complete. After laws are
changed, the task becomes one of changing hearts. So we do well to keep our
legal successes in perspective.

The task of
changing hearts suggests a second, and deeper, kind of perspective: a recognition that there are many social injustices,
and when we view our world through the lens of other people, we may find
ourselves in the role of the judge rather than the widow. A widened perspective leads us to examine whether
we, ourselves, are in the position of denying the personhood of someone else.
For those of us who are privileged because we are white, are we in solidarity
with people of other colors? Do we respect others who have a different native
language? A different level of ability? For those of us who are G or L or B,
are we supportive of the T, the trans folks among and around us – and vice
versa? THIS… is where the deepest spiritual growth occurs.

In my own
work of Holy Troublemaking, I find myself again and again being invited to open
my heart to something or someone that I found frightening. Will I sit down and
have a morning cup of coffee with a homeless man or woman? Will I have a
conversation with someone who just got out of jail? Having discovered pride in
myself as a white feminist, will I re-think my assumptions about people of
other colors and cultures? Will I open my mind, and my heart, to the face of
Christ in someone who seems very different from me?

As we
approach a time of healing, I invite you to listen to the Spirit within you.
What is your soul crying out for? – a spirit of persistence? A healing from
shame, into pride? A healing of perspective, from the need to control outcomes,
to a trust in the Spirit’s timing?Healing of openness to something new? Or something else entirely?